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The following is a compensated review for SoloSEO, a self-managed search engine optimization site.

SoloSEO is a search engine optimization toolkit based on the web, and targeted at DIY webmasters looking to optimize their sites while keeping marketing expenses low. SoloSEO’s sign-up process is easy. They have a 2-week free trial available, and they require minimal information from you (email address, name, etc.) to get started. Once you’ve gotten your username and password, you can proceed into the main dashboard screen, where most of the options you can choose in SoloSEO are available in a nice, easy-to-navigate fashion. The interface actually reminds me a lot of the WordPress admin page, so perhaps that’s why I find it so intuitive.

When you begin, SoloSEO walks you through the initial steps that are required to start tracking and optimizing your site. If you don’t have any analytics set up, SoloSEO recommends you to Google Analytics, but does mention that other options are available. As a side note here, I believe SoloSEO’s strategy of using already-available free web apps that exist on the web is an excellent one for keeping internal costs down, and thereby passing those cost reductions on to the website owners / customers that SoloSEO serves.

After you’ve chosen some sort of analytics software, SoloSEO begins to ask you for information about your site, beginning with the main keywords you would use to describe your site. All the reports generated in SoloSEO, including the ones that are immediately generated once you’ve given the site some keywords, are exportable into TSV or CSV formats. If you’re unsure what keywords accurately define your site, or are worried that you might miss some ‘obvious’ ones, SoloSEO allows you to search sites like Google AdWords, WordTracker, and Overture (or all three at once!) for related keywords. In my case, this resulted in about 25 useful results per search, including things like misspellings or incorrect pluralizations that apparently many people search for on the web.

Once you’ve defined your top keywords, SoloSEO takes you through the process of creating a sitemap for your site. This allows SoloSEO to perform additional functionality, such as checking for dead links of other nastiness that could drive potential customers away from your site. Among the other tasks SoloSEO originally outlines for you are creating additional topics for your site, with sub-topic keywords, and running a report to determine the effectiveness and page ranking of your site against that of your competition. All in all, it’s a very complete package that covers all the basics. I am particularly fond of the aggregator at the bottom of the dashboard which shows you your current ranking in several major indexes, such as Yahoo! and Alexa. This aggregator also lets you select the original link that SoloSEO is using to get your stats, in case you want to view them in the original context.

The price for SoloSEO is $29 a month, which allows you to track and optimize up to 5 domains. Each domain beyond that costs an additional $4 a month. Considering the tools the SoloSEO offers, and the knowledge and guidance that the task-based interface provides, it is an excellent option for fledgling websites trying to make an impact for their companies on the web. While there may be features required by major-market companies that SoloSEO does not provide, it certainly would accomplish everything I could possibly need in terms of tracking search keywords on my blog. My only suggestion is that perhaps a cheaper package for 1 or 2 domains could be offered, since $29 a month is a significant expense for me, considering my hosting is around a 1/3 that price, and I would be much more interested in purchasing a service for my single domain at a rate of around $5-7 dollars a month.

soloseo, search engine optimization, google, keywords, ads